Over the years, Magic has accrued quite the collection of keyword abilities. Some of these like flying or trample have stuck around and probably won’t be going anywhere. However, some keyword mechanics fall off as quickly as they pop up. A prime...
Read moreEvery once in a while you’ll be looking through cards and discover some niche mechanic you really like. Maybe you like how it works, or maybe it fits well with other things you like playing.
Read moreUniverses Beyond allows WotC to introduce different franchises to MTG. With The Brothers’ War and its artifact theme, the Transformers IP got its own Beyond treatment on 13 new cards.
Read moreMagic is well-known for designing creatures that fall into one of two camps: either the weaker, more expensive card with a great ability, or the cheaper, over-statted creature with a drawback. Decayed falls into that latter category...
Read moreRecover probably belongs to that group of Magic: The Gathering mechanics that sounded better in the designers’ minds. It’s still a quintessentially Magic-al mechanic, though, since it’s all about using your graveyard as a resource.
Read moreIf you ask an MTG player if the liked a random MTG set or not, chances are that they’ll tell you about the set’s mechanics. “Sure, I remember Ravnica. Populate was cool, and cipher was total garbage.” In this example, cipher is a keyword ability...
Read moreClash is a mechanic often remembered as a failure, if it’s remembered at all, more than a dozen years after the last clash cards were printed. But Mark Rosewater’s elegy for the mechanic is more nuanced: “I consider it a noble but failed...
Read moreMagic mechanics can get a little confusing sometimes, so we’re calling in the reinforcements. It’s me, I’m the reinforcements. Get it, reinforce-ments? I come prepared with rules knowledge and jokes!
Read moreEveryone has a kind of candy they don’t like. And if I offer you one, you might just take a look and say, “Ah, no thanks.” But if I toss a bunch of candy in a piñata and it all spews to the ground on the vessel’s dramatic destruction, you might...
Read moreCost reduction mechanics like delve and affinity are usually very exploitable and devastating to competitive MTG, often leading to cards and decks being banned. Undaunted is one of those mechanics, but it has a clear limit to cost reduction: the...
Read moreMagic is full of mechanics. Some are evergreen due to their popularity, and some are cool but aren’t supported thoroughly, like ascend.
Read more“Champion” is a word that has many different meanings, but two of them are the most well-known and the ones that relate to Magic. But there are only a handful of cards that have the champion ability, and that’s what we’re going to focus on...
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